Color-Changing Evergreens

Funnily enough, no-one has ever asked me to design a high maintenance garden, yet there is a common misconception that low maintenance translates to an endless row of boxwood or a border entirely devoted to rhododendrons. While these may be easy care they certainly won’t win any design awards. Yet evergreen trees and shrubs are…

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Design Evolution: doing it your way

As an independent designer I'm in the fortunate position of being able to design gardens that will be professionally installed by my recommended contractors*, by the homeowners themselves, or even by another preferred and local-to-the-site contractor. (*I never accept a referral fee so my recommendation is  based on the fact that they always do outstanding…

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Layers in the Winter Garden

Layering is a way of life here in the Pacific Northwest where on any given day, regardless of the season, you may be reaching for a fleece jacket one minute and peeling down to a T-shirt the next. As I looked outside early this morning the sun was just beginning to rise over the tree…

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Planning Fabulous Fall Combinations

Stop what you're doing for a moment, look out of the window, and take a long, hard look at your fall garden.  What do you see? I'm sure there are individual trees or shrubs that are breathtaking, but are they shown off to their best advantage? Do they read as random sparks here and there,…

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Fall Clean Up for Lazy Gardeners

I refuse to be a slave to my garden, which is why I designed it to be low maintenance; employing a variety of strategies to select plants that were both reliably easy care and suited to the space I had planned for them. Yet, there's no denying that even for me, fall is a busy…

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